Debezium CDC for Database Auditing
· Part of my work at Carousell
Abstract: An initiative to capture a real-time stream of database changes for auditing and analysis purposes using the Debezium platform.
Tech: #Debezium#Kafka#Change Data Capture#Data Engineering#BigQuery
The Challenge
In a complex system with many services, having a reliable and real-time audit trail of all database changes is crucial for security, compliance, and debugging. The existing methods for tracking these changes were insufficient and did not provide the required level of detail or real-time insight.
The Solution
I was tasked with exploring and implementing a solution using Debezium, an open-source distributed platform for Change Data Capture (CDC). The project involved:
- Exploring the Debezium Platform: I conducted initial research to evaluate Debezium's capabilities and its suitability for our environment.
- Deploying the Debezium Stack: I deployed the Debezium connectors to tail the transaction logs of our source databases, capturing every row-level change (
INSERT,UPDATE,DELETE) as a structured event. - Streaming to a Central Worker: These change events were streamed in real-time. I then worked on implementing a consumer service (worker) that would process this stream.
- Integration with BigQuery: The final step was to have the worker process the change events and persist them into Google BigQuery. This created a durable, queryable, and long-term analytical store of all historical database changes, fulfilling the project's auditing and analytical requirements.